Hey, Look Who's Reinventing Retail

It's an unusual combination for a startup executive: retail
expertise and tech savvy. Or it used to be. Now entrepreneurs are
launching trendy companies in fashion and merchandising that are
both disrupting the giant retail sector -- which nets about $400B
monthly in the U.S. -- and improving it for consumers.

You can hear from the disruptors reinventing retail at Social Commerce Summit Chicago, Business
Insider's deep-dive on the convergence of digital, social and
commerce, taking place June 7, 2012, in downtown Chicago.
Tickets are still available under the
early-bird rate.

Spaly, co-founder of the successful men's e-tailer Bonobos, has helped pivot social-commerce
startup Trunk Club from a limping experiment that matched men
with local stylists into a more robust business that allows male
shop-o-phobes to get quick, tailored recommendations. What's
more, users control the level of effort they must put into
interacting with retail reps. Sound revolutionary? Well, no. In
fact, it probably sounds like a lot of other e-commerce startups
you've come across.

So how does Spaly fight the signal-to-noise ratio? In the
uber-crowded online shopping space, how do you distinguish your
company, and make sure your product gets discovered by
users?

Joining Spaly to address the question at the Summit are Birchbox
co-founderKatia Beauchamp, and

Diego Berdakin, Co-founder, BeachMint

The Olsen twins, Jessica Simpson, Kate Bosworth, Rachel Bilson --
the list of beautiful people who have signed on to sell
merchandise with Berdakin and former MySpace co-founder Josh Berman borders on
teenage fantasy. Still, though, fashion competitor
ShoeDazzle has Kim Kardashian to plug its wares.
Social-shopping company OpenSky boasts Kristin
Cavallari, along with a slew of well-known figures in homeware,
food, and other retail subverticals. ShoeDazzle co-founder Brian
Lee and OpenSky founder John Caplan dished on how to stand out in
the crowd at the last Summit in New York.

But while celebrities might get customers in the door, customer
acquisition doesn't magically create retention. To keep coming
back, users have to like the product.

Now we'll hear from Berdakin: what are the best practices
in personalized shopping online?

Cam Balzer, CMO, Threadless

Started with $1,000 from founders' pockets in 2000, Threadless'
community-voting system gained traction with users and grew to
revenues of roughly $20 million by 2008, pushing
co-founder Jake Nickell's life into "crazy-rad-town," as he
describes it. But the Threadless story isn't just dream candy for
other rad founders -- Nickell's website calls him "the coolest
dude in the world" -- it also has a lot to teach social marketing
mavens. An early example of crowd-sourced commerce, Threadless
began to scale before Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, et. al. made the social web seem
obvious. And when networks later arose, Threadless jumped in
fast, leveraging the new platforms to grow its brand, community
and revenues. The company continues to hit social hard, as its
site still includes community engagement. And artists continue to
sign on with stylish designs.

So what is Threadless doing right? What can other e-commerce
shops learn about social promotions? And building an engaged and
active user base?

If you sell a design-focused product, what's the best way
to leverage the latest crop of visual-social services like
Pinterest and Instagram?